Supplemental Pages, PageRank not yet assigned Options

[perkle]

Hi all
I wonder if you could help me as I am a little confused. I changed my sites URL 7 months ago from asp to .html G has indexed some of the pages but all the new pages are listed as supplemental . I have a xml sitemap in place and don’t understand what G is telling me in my account (PageRank not yet assigned) what exactly does this mean. Do I need to do anything to the new pages other than link internally to them.

[Randy]

Did you set up 301 redirects from the old .asp pages to the new .html pages?

If not, you'll want to. It'll go a long way towards helping all of the engines understand the changes you've made to your site structure.

[perkle]

Thanks Randy
Yes I did 301 the home page but all the rest are new actually. Do I need to 301 them also even though they are new with internal links to them from indexed pages. Also WHAT does Pagerank not yet assigned mean.

[Randy]

You just lost me perkle.

Did the domain change completely?

Or did the domain stay the same and the page names change from .asp to .html

You need to 301 each old page to the most appropriate new page if the domain didn't change. If the domain changed you'll probably want to at least consider a 302 redirect for a time to account for Google's aging delay that gets slapped on brand new domains.

[perkle]

Sorry for the confusion
the home page changed from default.asp to index.html , it is indexed and all the new pages are html and they are supplemental in my account. I understand about the ageing delay thing but don't know what "Pagerank not yet assigned" means.

Does it mean G is not through with the ageing delay process yet or what!

[Randy]

What it means is that PageRank is not yet assigned.

The cause of that probably has nothing to do with the aging delay, as I've seen many, many pages on many new sites that have apparently been assigned PR (Toolbar PR anyway) but don't rank well because of the aging delay.

I have a feeling you've set up 301's for nothing but your home page. That means all of the rest of the "new" pages are in fact brand new to the search engines. Ideally you should have also set up 301's from all of your old .asp pages to these new .html pages.

[perkle]

The only page in the old site I wanted to keep was the home page which I did 301. the other pages I didn't want so I built brand new pages totally different from anything prior so there is nothing to 301 them from. The old site was a program driven site and it was just a mess, so I started over with everything (everything) I didn't want any of the old pages at all.

Let me try to ask the question differently. When will I know when Google realeases me from the ageing delay process. What will happen, What can I look for to know they are done. There is no need to work on the pages or Site until they finish as I have read in this forum if I understand it correctly. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/girl_cray2.gif)

Randy thanks for your patience with my questions.

[Michael Martinez]

The only page in the old site I wanted to keep was the home page which I did 301. the other pages I didn't want so I built brand new pages totally different from anything prior so there is nothing to 301 them from....

But there is. You most likely have links out there on the Web somewhere that point to the non-existent URLs. You're not only hurting your search engine positioning by not redirecting the old URLs, but you may be losing traffic if people are just getting 404 errors.

You need to set up a list of 301s (hopefully not too many) that tell browsers and spiders where to find the new pages.

[perkle]

Thanks Michael for the info. I was told that G didn't like the software program that I purchased to create the site, that it just was bad.
So thats why I started over trying to distance my new site from the old. I understand now it was the code which was bad and all I needed was to correct that.

I uploaded the new site on 12-2-06 and stopped the hosting from the old. So I have no idea what the page names were to redirect any possible links back to the new. I know at that time I had some 2,600 links to it and now only have about 450.

I guess to make things worse I owned another site which ranked #1 for a keyword and had a number of links in it to the current site I now use. Some told me I lost ranking in the current site because of too many dynamic pages in the other site pointing to it with links. Too many links in one site pointing to me. I sold that domain and stopped it also.

At this point I don't know the url's of either to do anything with them. My current site has gone from a PR5 to a PR2. I have spent thousands on the two sites and have been taken in by several very unreal people concerning SEO work and their advice.

Is there anything I can do at this point to salvage the domain name. I think I have a good clean site now.

[Randy]

I would concur with Michael that it's possible you're leaving some link popularity laying out there that might be useful. If nothing else you can redirect all of those back to the home page. It should be easy to do also if all of the old pages were .asp and now there are no .asp pages.

When will I know when Google realeases me from the ageing delay process. What will happen, What can I look for to know they are done.

Pick out a few phrases and check them monthly or so. Try to get a phrase or two that is more competitive and a couple that are less competitive.

What you'll typically see is the lesser competitive phrases start to move up in the SERPs, followed shortly thereafter by the more competitive phrases starting to make a move up the ranking ladder.

That said, I'd caution you against doing nothing until the site emerges from the aging delay. Most especially I'd urge you to continue with or start a linking building campaign as if it didn't exist. Not only can this help you to get pages out of the supplemental index but it can be quite advantageous when the site finally does emerge. Or to put it another way, it's much better to emerge from the aging delay in the Top 5 for your most competitive terms than it is to rest on your laurels and emerge as a Top 30 site.

[Michael Martinez]

In addition to Randy's good advice, in your situation I would create a custom 404 document that points visitors to the most important pages on your site, including a brief description of the change in design.

The spiders will not crawl the links, so you'll always see hits to that 404 document, but I use this on my own domains and am satisfied.

If you want to validate your site with Yahoo! Site Explorer or Google Webmaster Central, they both require that you have a valid 404 page that sends a 404 code in the header. An old trick that I and many other people used to promote was to serve a live URL as the 404 page. That helped with crawling issues but site validation just would not work.

I feel strongly that using a custom 404 document with embedded links (that sends the correct code) is the best solution. You should have an HTML sitemap that all your pages link to and it wouldn't hurt to upload an XML sitemap and ping the search engines. I would refresh the XML sitemap about once a month (and ping the search engines each time).

[jehochman]

If you want to validate your site with Yahoo! Site Explorer or Google Webmaster Central, they both require that you have a valid 404 page that sends a 404 code in the header.

You don't need a custom 404 page to validate. You have to make sure your server properly returns error code 404 when it receives a request for a non-existing page. That said, the custom 404 error page with links is always a good idea.

If you can make your site spiderable, you do not need a site map at all. It's just a waste of time in my opinion. If you have a whackjob content management system, or a legacy site that has non-crawlable links, a sitemap can definitely help. I am a crawlability fanatic. Instead of using sitemaps, I just fix the underlying problem.

[perkle]

Now we're gaining on it. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/appl.gif) I think

Can someone tell me how to find the URL for those old nonexistent pages.

[Randy]

umm... Do you have a backup copy of the old site? Or did you happen to save any site:yourdomain.com lookups before the change?

It's pretty difficult to find all of the pages after the fact. You can review your error log file to see which old .asp pages are still being hit by either visitors or search engine spiders. You won't get 'em all most likely this far after things have been changed, but you should get some of them at least.

[Michael Martinez]

If you can make your site spiderable, you do not need a site map at all. It's just a waste of time in my opinion. If you have a whackjob content management system, or a legacy site that has non-crawlable links, a sitemap can definitely help. I am a crawlability fanatic. Instead of using sitemaps, I just fix the underlying problem.

HTML sitemaps are user-friendly and many people use them. It's always a good idea to offer an HTML site map on a large site.

While I strongly agree with fixing "the underlying problem", in this particular situation there appears to be no way to fix it (since the old URLs are not catalogued for easy reference and correction via 301 redirects).